If you’re in senior management you never stop looking for ways to do things better. That’s the way you live your leadership. You develop your team, provide training for supervisors and managers, mentor high potentials, hold strategic planning retreats. And you always gather your facts first, so you have data that gives you a clear starting point for planning—just as you review monthly balance sheets to help determine financial plans.

That’s where employee assessments and surveys come in. Find out where you are in order to set out for where you want to go in terms of your employees, the lifeblood of your organization. It’s like using your GPS.

With an employee engagement survey, you can spend your time strategizing action on data, rather than just analyzing data. You can find out where opportunities exist before they become problems. You can also save some of the time, money, and anguish normally spent on employee retention—the key challenge noted by 46% of HR professionals.

So what’s the difference between an employee engagement survey and an employee satisfaction survey?

Steve Grant, writing on surveygizmo.com, explains it this way:

The terms “employee engagement survey” and “employee satisfaction survey” are often used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be. They are quite different – and savvy organizations that understand the difference will always want to measure levels of employee engagement over satisfaction….

While you certainly don’t want unsatisfied employees, a satisfied workforce will only get your company so far. Satisfaction simply states that you treat your employees fairly. An engaged employee, however, is one that is more committed to the long-term success of the company.

If you’ve never surveyed your employees, you might be surprised at how much you can learn—and how fast. A ten-minute online survey (from survey monkey, survey gizmo, and a score of others) can net candid views of everything from management to benefits and company culture. Are employees likely to recommend your company as an employer to their friends and family? Do they have a good working relationship with their manager? What’s the most important thing the company could do to enhance their engagement? Etc.

You can also make sure your survey is completely anonymous, quelling the fears many employees have about potential retribution. In addition, it’s possible to get benchmarks for your results, comparing your data to organizations of similar size and focus.

If you decide to survey employees, you have lots of options: Choose a ready-made survey and administer it in-house or hire a consultant to customize one for your organization, assuring employees that no one “inside” sees their data directly. Just make sure the survey fits your organization, its work and its culture.

A good response rate hovers around 70% according to officevibe.com, although an average we’re told to expect is closer to 30%. I think that’s overly pessimistic: I’ve seen 90% several times and even 100%. Success lies in how you design, introduce, administer, and follow up the survey.

So how do you know if it’s time to conduct an engagement survey? Here are four tips I suggest:

• You’ve never surveyed your employees’ engagement. Now you can ask things you really wanted to know but couldn’t tactfully ask face-to-face.
• Employees and managers are painting a very rosy picture. This is only normal, given human beings’ evolutionary need for self-protection.
• It’s been two or more years since your last survey. Things change. Thankfully,  it’s incredibly quick and cheap to repeat an online survey once it’s been created.
• You’ve heard rumblings but aren’t privy to exactly what’s going on.  Either you’re distant from the action because of your own role, or as a CEO I know puts it: “Once you put on a suit, nobody tells you the truth anymore.”

You can get people to tell you the truth. And you can (should) use what they tell you.

That brings me to my final tip: Since 25% of employees think that managers use surveys as a “tick box exercise,” (according to officevibe.com), don’t ask people to tell you the truth unless you in turn tell them (1) what you find out, and (2) what part of it you’ll start working on this year.

They’ll be watching.

What tactics have you used for assessing employee input? Join the conversation by adding a comment below.

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